Advanced lighting and OpenGL renderer inside T3D

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Not supporting Advanced Lighting is driven primarily by the technical limitations of OpenGL and the subsequent performance penalties Advanced Lighting suffered. Advanced Lighting performs best with single channel 32 bit floating point textures, and dual channel 16 bit integer textures. OpenGL lacks native support for either of these formats, forcing Advanced Lighting to use much less efficient four channel 32 bit floating point textures andfour channel 16 bit floating point textures. The latter is not a typo, due to various implementation oddities 16 bit integer textures in any form are not reliable in OpenGL. Using these less efficient texture formats has an extreme impact on Advanced Lighting's VRAM usage, pushing it as high as 100 MB for a "simple" scene. Add that to the VRAM used by OS X itself and to the VRAM required for your game assets, and it quickly exceeds the capacity of most GPUs Apple ships, including the 512 MB 9600M in my MacBook Pro.

Compounding these performance issues, we encountered a couple of bugs in Apple's OpenGL drivers which cost us a considerable amount of time to track down and workaround (we aren't the only ones suffering here), and there are still a few which we have not managed to track down yet. I believe with time and with Apple's assistance we might be able to work around or solve these issues, but that's a dependency we may not wish to place ahead of the product's release. Our time before 1.0 is likely better spent improving stability and performance for all users and ensuring that the Mac experience with Basic Lighting is as smooth and polished as possible.

Quote:Is Advanced Lighting via OpenGL even possible? My understanding was that OGL lacked support for certain texture formats required to render AL at any kind of decent framerate.